Sometimes ‘awful’ is just not a strong enough word. Sometimes a movie’s true wretchedness will assault you for over 100 minutes, leaving you laughing breathlessly while at the same time annoying the hell out of you. That’s the trial that awaits you should you choose to watch Boxing Helena, one of the most ridiculous and moronic studio productions of the 1990s. Directed by Jennifer Chambers Lynch, the 25-year-old daughter of director David Lynch (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Dune), this is a simply atrocious movie, so irredeemably bad that it may leave you with tears steaming down your cheeks.
During pre-production of this movie, Kim Basinger was sued by the producers for dropping out of Boxing Helena, thereby defaulting on an ‘oral agreement’. Basinger was replaced by the jaw-droppingly bad (yet suitably busty) Sherilyn Fenn and she was (eventually) forced to pay over two million bucks in a settlement. Based on the end product and its universally known stink of failure, I’d wager that’s the best two million Basinger ever spent.
You can sometimes tell a lot by reading a movie’s promotional literature. The press notes for Boxing Helena offer a quote from The Washington Post that boldly states, “This film is art-directed like Architectural Digest come to life.” What can you say about a film where the highest praise available compares the movie to the world’s dullest magazine? The notes go on to explain how writer/director Lynch wrote this script in two months when she was 19-years-old. And I’m certain that nepotism had nothing to do with young Ms. Lynch helming this pic (at a record-age 25). If we’ve learned anything from the offspring of Joan Rivers and Freddie Prinze, it’s that talent is not always hereditary.
Boxing Helena is one of the most amateurish, laughably written, poorly directed and atrociously acted films I have seen. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun watching it. There are more laughs in this movie than there are in the last four Police Academy movies combined. The only difference here is that Helena’s laughs come unintentionally. You want plot? How’s this: a doctor (Julian Sands) with a creepy Mommy Complex starts obsessing over the lovely young Helena (Fenn). When the trampy young gal is the victim of a nasty car accident, the befuddled doc brings her inside and ‘cares for her’ in the most brutal way imaginable. Ah, love.
The subtext about how couples hurt and alienate each other is obvious, especially considering that the same three points are drummed home every nine seconds. The dialogue will make you snort. The performances (particularly by the twitching and corpse-like Sands) are howlingly bad. As a director, Lynch displays the skills of a wobbly tripod. It’s impossible to tell which reaction this movie will provoke first: disgust, incredulity or just plain boredom.
